Mullen holding on by a thread after embarrassing loss to Georgia

Embed from Getty Images

When I think about Florida’s 34-7 loss to Georgia, one play jumps to mind immediately and it’s probably not the one you’re thinking of.

You might think the one that jumps to mind is Anthony Richardson’s fumble, where had he been able to go down Florida would have – at minimum – run out the clock to end the half. You might think that it’s either of the interceptions that followed, as those led to Georgia basically putting the game away in the blink of an eye.

But those aren’t the ones that jump out to me. This one is.

That’s about the worst onsides kick attempt you’ll ever see. It goes 15 yards and just bounces out of bounds. Even if it checked up, it was right at a Georgia player to recover before Florida could get down the field. Mullen even had a wry smile on his face as he was talking to his kicker afterwards, one of those “what in the hell was that” smiles that you give your 3-year old when he comes downstairs with his pants on backwards.

It’s not that the onsides kick had anything to do with the outcome of the game. It was already well in hand at that point. But the execution of the kick indicates the real problem with this team: the small details are constantly overlooked.

That’s how you end up with two missed field goals and a fourth-and-13 attempt that only happens because you have no faith in your kicker (full disclosure, I liked going for it there). That’s how you end up with false starts killing drives when the first down was well in hand. And that’s how you end up handing Georgia the game at the end of the first half with a cadre of turnovers.

This loss to Georgia won’t define this season. That already happened with the games dropped to Alabama, Kentucky and LSU. We all knew that winning this game was a long shot.

But it may end up defining Dan Mullen’s tenure at Florida.

Getting embarrassed by your rival – and the team you have to beat to get where you want to go – is something that’s going to be hard for Gators fans to swallow. Lose, sure. But getting embarrassed isn’t going to win Dan Mullen any confidence that he has a plan to compete consistently with Kirby Smart.

Because Georgia had a down year – and bad QB play – in 2020 and went 8-2 against an all-SEC schedule. Florida is now 2-4 in the conference with, quite honestly, better QB play than Georgia had last season. That means what we’ve suspected all along; that Florida is going to have to get elite QB play to take down the Bulldogs.

And despite the flashes Anthony Richardson has shown in 2021, we also just saw that he has a significant ways to go to hit that mark.

That means that while Dan Mullen can talk about asking his players to “hold on to the rope,” the rope that Mullen is speaking of may be wearing down to the threads.

It’s not just Anthony Richardson

Anthony Richardson didn’t play well at all, but the rest of his team didn’t help him much.

We had heard coming into the game that he and Emory Jones were sharing snaps evenly. Mullen reiterated that was the case in his post-game press conference. That’s just ridiculous.

If you’re going to give a player his first start against this defense, he needs to be getting the bulk of the reps. Is it any wonder that Richardson looked shaky when you hadn’t even given him the best chance to be successful during the last two weeks of preparation?

Mullen didn’t think he was ready. He hedged and made sure to get Jones plenty of practice reps so he’d be ready if needed. And that hedge meant he had an ill-prepared QB making his first start against the best defense in the country.

But it wasn’t just Mullen. With the game still 3-0, Richardson converted a fourth-and-2 to get Florida to the Georgia 31. This was the next play.

Mullen tried to call a shot here. I think it was going to be open. But Jean Delance (#56), Stewart Reese (#51) and Kingsley Eguakun (#65) weren’t able to hold up against the stunt run by linebacker Nolan Smith (#4) and defensive tackle Jalen Carter (#88).

This is only a 4-man rush. The Gators had a 3-on-2 advantage and neither Reese nor Eguakun even touched Carter. The line has to give Richardson time here to get the throw off. With more experience, maybe he throws this away as he drifts out of the pocket, but he was waiting for his receiver to come open and just didn’t have time.

The next play was the ridiculous double-pass on second-and-20 that had no shot at succeeding followed by a Nay’Quan Wright run on an option that led to the fourth-and-13 attempt that went awry.

But the thing you might have forgotten is that just prior to the Wright run, Richard Gouraige had a false start to push the Gators back another five yards. I think Mullen tries the field goal if they’re at fourth-and-8 from the UGA 29 (a 46-yard attempt).

It wasn’t just that drive. On the opening drive of the second half, Richardson hit an 8-yard run to make it third-and-1. He was about to convert on a QB power when Josh Braun committed a false start penalty. The next play was a completion 2-yards shy of the first down and Florida punted the ball back to Georgia.

Richardson isn’t without blame here. You can’t turn the ball over three times and he made plenty of rookie mistakes. This play is one of them that he’ll learn from.

This is a zone blitz called by Georgia. This is a really difficult coverage for a young QB to read (in fact, Emory Jones got tricked by it later in the game but the defender dropped it). Georgia defensive lineman Travon Walker (#44, highlighted) drops back into coverage while linebacker Nakobe Dean (#17) comes on a blitz.

If you were watching the telecast, you saw Richardson get excoriated by Mullen earlier in the game when the blitz came and he improvised rather than throwing in the direction of the blitz (color man Gary Danielson pointed it out at the time). Well, this time Richardson throws right where Dean had vacated to Xzavier Henderson coming over the middle. But he completely missed Walker dropping into that lane and the ball is tipped and intercepted.

If you want to sum up the Florida offense though, I think it’s best done through three plays.

Those are the three plays that Florida ran after Georgia turned the ball over. Perhaps you could understand the conservative nature of those play calls because two of them came deep in Gators territory.

But they decided to run the ball with Pierce after the fumble to open the second half rather than take a deep shot with the ball in Bulldog territory.

Compare that to what Georgia did when it got a Gators turnover near mid-field.

I’m not sure what Florida’s defense was doing on this play. Both Trey Dean (#0) and Tre’Vez Johnson (#16) come up to help with the run even though Dean and Rashad Torrence (#22) are back in a cover-2 look to start the play. That leaves three defensive backs to cover three receivers and gives Kearis Jackson (#10) a running start at Torrence.

Not only is this an aggressive play call by Georgia, but it was able to catch Florida cheating up against the run. In my preview, I was a big proponent of playing man-to-man and making Georgia beat you over the top. But I meant press man-to-man, not giving the receiver a 20-yard free release.

No matter what this route was, Jackson was going to be open. There’s just no way for Torrence to be able to guard this well. The only way Florida could have stopped it was if they were bringing pressure, but they didn’t do that either as they played a zone underneath and only rushed four.

It is absolutely true that the defense played pretty well against Georgia. But when Florida needed stops after the turnovers, it wasn’t able to get the job done.

They were undoubtedly put into tough situations. But this is the second straight game where the offense has turned the ball over twice and both have been converted to touchdowns. Sometimes your offense is going to put you in bad positions. You have to be able to force field goals and keep it 9-0 or 13-0 instead of 17-0.

The pick-6 to make it 24-0 was the final nail in the coffin, but the game was over the minute Bennett hit Jackson to make the lead 17. And to have a defense unprepared for that deep shot just speaks to the inconsistencies that have plagued this team all year long.

Takeaway

I’m not sure any of us expected Florida to win this game. Georgia is the number one team in the country for a reason, and Florida is unranked for a reason as well.

But I think we all expected the Gators to put up a better fight. You could say that they did until the three turnovers to end the half, but you could also say that all of the fight ended the minute the first turnover occurred.

Dan Mullen can talk all he wants about “holding onto the rope” as he did during his postgame press conference, but he needs to take a good look in the mirror after this one.

Because holding the rope means playing the guys who give the team the best chance to win, and giving those players the full starter’s reps in practice. It means either recruiting or developing a kicker who can make a field goal often enough that you’re not forced to go for it on fourth-and-13. It means taking shots after you get turnovers, even if you’re deep in your own territory.

And it sure as hell means going for it on fourth-and-5 from Georgia’s 6-yard line halfway through the third quarter when you’re down by 24. Yes, Jace Christmann missed a 23-yard field goal, but Mullen essentially threw in the towel right there when he had a chance to at least make Georgia sweat a little bit.

I think Georgia is an excellent team, maybe even a national championship team. And I think people (finally) asking hard questions about recruiting are right to do so. Florida does have less talent than Georgia and you should expect the Bulldogs to be a formidable opponent because of that. After all, the Bulldogs are ranked second in the country in total talent according to the 247Sports roster rankings.

But Florida is ranked 7th.

But what did the Gators get in this game from Justin Shorter? What did they get from Brenton Cox? What did they get from Demarkcus Bowman, Lorenzo Lingard, Gervon Dexter or Jason Marshall?

Many of those guys played, but none of them made a huge difference and they are Florida’s 5-star guys. If you’re going to lean on sub-elite recruiting and player development, your 5-star guys have to develop into stars.

Compare that to Georgia. Nolan Smith, Zamir White, Jalen Carter, Nakobe Dean, Travon Walker, and Darnell Washington (all 5-stars) all played significant roles in this game. Carter got the sack that pushed Florida out of field goal range. Walker got the tip that caused Richardson’s first interception. Dean got the pick-6 that essentially ended the game.

Yes, Georgia has more talent than Florida. But if you’re going to build a program on the idea that you can develop talent better than the other guys, you have to actually do it better, and significantly so.

I wrote an article last week defending Dan Mullen and saying that he deserved a chance to see what he can do with a full season of Anthony Richardson at QB and the roster that he’s built. But performances like this make it much more difficult to stand behind that assessment.

I’m a big believer in process over results. If Mullen was recruiting at a high level, developing his players at an elite level and had his QBs ready to play along with some schematic wrinkles to punish Georgia’s aggressiveness, you could give him a pass for his 2-8 record against LSU, Alabama and Georgia.

Instead, I’m just left hoping he can turn it around, without much historical or statistical reason to believe he can do so. So I’m left depressed at this game, this season and the state of the program.

The Gator Standard means SEC and National Championships. We’ve never felt further away from that than right now.

Help Support Read & Reaction!

Thanks to everyone who has signed up with our new sponsor, Thrive Fantasy, the past couple of weeks! If you haven’t had a chance to sign up yet, new users who either click on the Thrive logo below or follow THIS LINK can get a 100% deposit match up to $100.

Thrive Fantasy is daily fantasy football for the common fan. The difference between Thrive and other NFL daily fantasy games is that Thrive focuses on only the top-tier athletes in the NFL. That way, you don’t have to know about the Texans third-string running back to have fun playing.

Thrive has over $90,000 guaranteed in prizes for Week 4 of the NFL and has awarded over $5 million. They have a featured $50,000 guaranteed contest for today ($50k NFL Ticket) with a $20 entry and first place takes home $10,000.

Nick and I are going to be doing some competitions in the coming weeks where you’ll get to compete with us, so sign up and we’ll keep you updated on those!

And if Daily Fantasy isn’t your thing, please click on one of the embedded ads while you’re here to help us out.

Thanks for your support!